


Songs and Belongings

by botgal



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, If You Squint - Freeform, Singing, Underwater, and how eridan comes to that legacy, and the orphaners of past, in their respective quadrants, mostly the relationship between gl'bgolyb, some hints of erifef and erivris
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 13:44:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9387749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/botgal/pseuds/botgal
Summary: "The Orphaners never belonged to the Empress, not really. Certainly, the Empress, and the many heiresses she has seen come and go over her innumerable sweeps, were the ones that found these individuals and had them hunt to feed her. But really, they belonged to this great, ghostly white wonder and horror of the deep. It was they, and you, who forged your lives around her. Always keeping in the constant back of your mind when she would be hungry and how much you would need to hunt to keep her satisfied. You were under the Empress's order, but at her beck and call.You are not Feferi's Orphaner. You are not the Empire's.You are hers, and hers alone."





	

The first time you see her is as such a small wiggler. Barely more than three sweeps. Hardly old enough to really understand much of your world outside your lusus and your responsibilities.

You are the young Orphaner, descendant of a great Orphaner. And today, for the first time, you delivered a kill to the Carbuncle of the Deep on your own, rather than handing it to your moirail to deliver. Your moirail is busy, and has asked to entrust you to delivering the important meal you had brought down which would extend the life of your race by another week.

You had accepted, of course, for your moirail.

Fear had you hesitating a moment longer after delivering your kill, watching this great beast devouring your kill, before you feel it send a chill through you that has you turning and beginning to swim back up to the surface.

A firm grasp at your ankle stops your ascent and very nearly your whole collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system.

You turn your head around, and spot the lusus-white tentacle which now prevents you arising back to the surface. Another tentacle approaches, and your whole body freezes up. Feferi was wrong you're going to die you're going to be eaten you're going to be dragged down and never see anyone else ever again because you'll be dead you are so dead

You just manage to clamp your eyes shut, not wanting to be able to see the end when it comes; and all you feel is a gentle touch. Velvety, soft, almost soothing; cooler than even the ocean depths around you and like the skin of your moirail. Then a soft note takes up your senses and everything seems to go completely still.

It's not something you can really hear, not like a song travels through the air on land, even if you weren't currently in the deafening ocean deep. It's more like a vibration, a sensation that trembles against the very edges of your thinkpan. Instincts tell your eyes to open, and they do.

You look down at her again, mind wiped of fear and hesitation. The sensation at your cheek that you felt was nothing less than one of the fearsome Speaker's many tentacles. Not lashing or crushing or hurting; just gentle strokes and curls against the wiggler-softness of your skin. It's cool to the touch, just like Fef's, and you're somehow more calmed by that sensation even than the way she had just wiped all sense of fear from your head with one crooned note of her ancient song.

This great beast which should fill you with awe and terror is trying to calm you. Even the complete absence of expression in her gargantuan eyes seems to hold a note of soothing.

The sound-not-sound escapes her again and you know it's her even if you can't see a single shift of her massive beak you just know it's her. That sensation hits your thinkpan again and you're reminded to just be calm. She will not harm you. You are in no danger. Have no fear.

Her tendril examines your face by impossibly delicate touch a few minutes longer. Her eyes always focused on you and nothing at the same time. Her notes hit your ears at odd intervals when she apparently senses you need them. You don't know what it is she's looking for on you, but her whispered songs tell you not to care, not to struggle. Just be still and be not afraid.

Then, just like that, her tentacles retreat and you are adrift in the open water once more.

The spell seems to break and suddenly you're still not afraid but breathless. Some great weight has lifted from your thinkpan and your first conscious thought is to turn and rush back to the surface as you had originally intended. She lets you leave without another note of her song or another attempt to grab you.

You surface and your lusus comes to you, and you fling yourself into his mighty tail and cry even though you don't understand yourself why you do so. He seems to understand, though. Even if he is but an animal who cares for you there is something in his wise genetic memory which tells him that it is okay to curl you up in his tail and comfort you after you have surfaced from this duty which you have performed for the first time today.

You ride sniffling and clingy the whole way home on his back and though he usually whinnies complaints when you leave him saddled overnight, he simply carries you to your coon and dips you into the slime the moment you arrive at your hive. You curl up in the soothing green substance and drift off to sleep. Your normally dreamless doze is instead filled with strange notes of a not-quite song that has you awakening the next night with cheeks moist from something far thinner than the thick smoothness of sopor.

–

You don't see much of the Carbuncle of the Deep early in your life. Feferi is usually always there, ready to drag the meals you kill for her down to the depths. Your job is obtainment, not delivery. The eldricht Speaker is always looming, always hungry. So both of your jobs are constant, but there is still a difference.

You cannot afford to miss your job. Whether it's in keeping up with your FLARP campaigns with your kismesis or riding out hunting solo when that doesn't bear you fruit, you must always be prepared to bring down food to give to her. You like to play it up in your head to give you some motivation, if you will. You are the valiant Orphaner, bravely pursuing prey whenever you exit your abode to bring back to the one you pity so that she can be happy; no matter how weary or ill you may be, and she pities you for it and you pity her.

She, on the other hand, can afford to miss her duty. She can because you will allow her to. All it takes is one plea, one pout or stare with a quivering lip, and you give in to her. It's all because of pity and you can't stop yourself. Not that you really want to. It's what you do for your moirail, right?

Every time you descend, though, you wonder if it really is such a good thing to let pity be so strong a drive in your life.

It would be a foolish thing to stop being afraid of such a dangerous creature, of course that fact never stops being true. You are always filled with a certain trepidation about coming near her, but not outright fear ever since the first few times you come to her as a wiggler.

Yet always there is a constant to your scattered meetings then, and the ones you have increasingly more of as you grow older and your moirail grows closer to the day she must fight for her claim.

You give the Carbuncle her meal, you wait for her to eat; inevitably those great white tendrils always come up for you. Most times one finds its way around your waist, just barely curling around your grubscars and keeping you adrift in the water for her songs to reach you. Your moirail can hear them without feeling her thinkpan shut down around her, thanks to her tyrian heritage, but you have no such blood in your veins. Though noble and royal it may be, you are no heiress. You are vulnerable to the way Gl'bgolyb's song caresses your thinkpan in so much the same way as her ivory tendrils stroke your face with touch like a velvety kiss.

Her words echo within as they cloud over from her ancient notes ringing against your every thought.

Little royal violet blood. Little prince adorned with gold and jagged waves. Little prince with the curvy-jagged horns and the teeth like a shark's; with a flush for one of her daughters and a pitch for a girl with eight sights.

She recalls your face from before, she knows your form and your face and your blood. Another of violet with horns and gold and jagged waves. One who served her so faithfully whose fate was always to end in blood. Her little adorned prince who served her so long ago who has returned to her to serve once more.

Because the truth, as she sings it you, is very simple.

The Orphaners never belonged to the Empress, not really. Certainly, the Empress, and the many heiresses she has seen come and go over her innumerable sweeps, were the ones that found these individuals and had them hunt to feed her. But really, they belonged to this great, ghostly white wonder and horror of the deep. It was they, and you, who forged your lives around her. Always keeping in the constant back of your mind when she would be hungry and how much you would need to hunt to keep her satisfied. You were under the Empress's order, but at _her_ beck and call.

You are not Feferi's Orphaner. You are not the Empire's.

You are _hers_ , and hers alone.

It is these same notes of claim that she sings to you over and over as you come to feed her. With more frequency by the sweep as your moirail's time of ascension comes ever nearer and she readies to fight for her throne. So that, as the Carbuncle sings to you, she will follow the path of her predecessor and soon no longer have time to spend on the lusus who nurtured and protected. Who she loved for her care but resented for her need for blood.

But that would be fine, she always croons as her songs trail off in your head, because she will always have you.

Her concerto of truths drawn to the melody of her ancient voice ends, and you are released. And you return to your hive with the lingering notes in your pan even as you drift off to sleep.

–

Your moirail passes her ascension. She wins her battles and gains her Empire. She faces the dangers and she wins, and you stand by and cheer on her victory.

And she smiles and nods to you, the loyal you who stood by her, as though you were any other face in the crowd.

She has no time for you anymore. Your childish dreams of death and genocide to all who dwelled on land far behind you, she no longer feels you must be kept under watch. She no longer has time for the burden of you, and she is free from what kept it. So you stand in your mostly empty diamond with her as she raises her empire and treats you as she does any other. Feeling the craving to step out of it and tell her which sort of pity you really have for her.

But you can't. Because, more than anything, more than being rejected for revealing your flush feelings, you fear losing your diamond with her most of all. You feel that if you lose this with her, you will never have anything so close to her again.

–

In the depths, you can feel soothed again. You bring her her meals looking forward to her cold, horror-filled embrace. No matter how much peace is brought upon trollkind, there must be death to keep it all together. No longer does your diamond have time to do the gruesome work of bringing slain corpses of mighty white beasts to the depths into the gaping maw of her lusus.

As _she_ has crooned to you so many times in your sweeps of life, that duty and that pleasure has, and will always, forever belong to you and your ilk.

Perhaps you have lost your mind in some small sense, to no longer feel fear or hesitation as you see those great tendrils approach. You lean your head into the velvet of her slippery skin, imagining for a moment that the icy cold of her touch is that of your empress. That the dark undertones of possessiveness and ownership are simple pale consolations (or, dare you fantasize of it on some odd days of indulgence, an inviting red).

And so she sings to you her songs of madness and fortunes and truths in the deepest depths. As has always been. And as ever shall be.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Bluh bluh self indulgence and Eridan. Fight me.


End file.
